Sunday, December 21, 2014

Merl Reagle’s syndicated Sunday crossword, “Puzzling 101”

Merl Reagle crossword solution, 12 21 14 “Puzzling 101”

It’s the crossword’s 101st birthday, so “Puzzling 101” refers to both an introductory course, such as is provided by the theme answers, and the 101 years. Assorted phrases are redefined in a crossword context:

116a. [Make crosswords as a career?], LIVE OFF THE GRID. This is what Merl does.

It’s not typical for Merl to include just seven theme entries. Just how many familiar phrases of 12 to 15 words are there that can be clued as if they pertain to crosswords? Crossing, numbers, square, letters in boxes, black and white, clues, grid—all that’s left is the more arcane, insidery terms like “checking” and “cheaters” that could be applied to the theme but would perplex most solvers.

The upside of a lighter theme is that there’s more wiggle room for the fill, which is relatively smooth. There were a couple names I relied heavily on crossings for:

I do wish that 100d. WORDS ([What arguers exchange]) had been left on the editing room floor, given the number of clues with “crossword” (five themers), “worded” (121a), or “word” (46d) in them. 50d: NEST IN feels a little weird, the DDE monogram didn’t need to be joined by RWR, and nobody’s excited to find an 17d: E TILE in the crossword.

Three more things:

111d. [Number of e’s in Beethoven?], DREI. Not sure that a question mark suggests “in German,” but I enjoyed the clue.

11d. [Hilarious], A RIOT. This works in straight substition—”she’s hilarious” = “she’s a riot”—but adjective ≠ noun, so the standard “clues and answers are the same part of speech” rule is deviated from here.

89d. [Ruffians], MAULERS. A bit of a roll-your-own word when it comes to common nouns. Who uses this? The word seems to get some traffic in team names (sub-NHL hockey, roller derby, the old USFL), but none of the teams are quite famous enough for a puzzle clue.

Four stars from me.

Joel Fagliano’s New York Times crossword, “Season’s Greetings”

NY Times crossword solution, 12 21 14 “Season’s Greetings”

Santa’s standard greeting is “Ho, ho, ho!” Joel’s appended a HO to various phrases and words, making new combos:

22a. [Homer that leaves people yawning?], HO-HUM DINGER. A humdinger is a home run.

24a. [“Shucks!” or “Pshaw!”?], HOKEY WORD. Nice!

42a. [Southwest tribe after a fistfight?], BLACK-EYED HOPIS. First spelling change, from peas to -pis.

117a. [Stuff your dad finds ridiculous?], HOKUM TO PAPA. “Come to Papa,” another spelling change. Might’ve been nice to open the grid with this one and set the stage for the spelling changes to follow. Perhaps Joel tried that and the resulting fill was worse?

Including this week’s 66/24 crossword from Todd McClary, it appears we have just 15 more Post Puzzlers to savor. Sigh. I really hope that somehow the Post Puzzler continues–quality freestyle puzzles like this one deserve a regular home. I have this fantasy that someone like Frank Longo or Patrick Berry or Trip Payne will be asked to succeed Peter Gordon as editor. Okay, “fantasy” probably isn’t the right word, for fantasies rarely live up to the hype when played out in real life. But you get the point.

For now, I suppose, all we can do is savor what’s before us. This week’s puzzle has lots of cool entries. It also had some unfamiliar (for me) names and vocabulary that made for a harder solve, but I still found myself satisfied when everything fell.

Logically enough, I began in the northwest. I had a feeling that BEER CHASER was the answer to [Shot accompaniment, perhaps], but I didn’t trust myself to type it in until I had a few crossings in place. Like many solvers (I’m guessing), I thought of ERIN MORAN and SCOTT BAIO for the [“Joanie Loves Chachi” co-star], but those 9-letter names were too short for this 10-letter answer. Luckily, a few more crossings let me see AL MOLINARO, who played Al Delvecchio on this and ‘Happy Days.” Yep, yep, yep. Confession: my first guess was AL MARINARO, which really slowed me down on the crossing ROMAN MILE ([Ancient unit based on a thousand marching paces]) and CLAUSES ([They may be dependent]).

That diagonal wall of squares isolating the northwest meant I had to journey either to the northeast or southwest. Given I had the starting letters to the triple-stack up top, heading to the northeast was an easy choice. For some reason I wanted the [Breakfast order] to begin with OPEN-FACED or OMELET, but it was the much-more-straightforward ORANGE JUICE. Underneath, POLAR VORTEX, the [Cold weather phenomenon], is a terrific entry, but since I knew not that RODMEN were [Surveyors’ assistants] instead of [NBA rebounding legend Dennis, et al], nor that there’s a signaling device called an ALDIS lamp, it took a long time to find the vortex. Then, underneath that sits EDDIE ALBERT. Now I know him from “Green Acres.” But I didn’t know he was an [Oscar nominee for “The Heartbreak Kid”]. So yeah, that corner wasn’t exactly easy. (Speaking of the northeast corner, I loved the clue for Michael CERA, [Pilgrim portrayer in a 2010 film]. The film has nothing to do with Plymouth Rock or Thanksgiving–it’s “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.”)

Next came the skinny midsection, a stair-stepped arrangement of five-letter answers made more complicated by their feeding into longer Downs. I thought my toeholds into [Outlet for a drill?] were questionable, since it looked like this: ?IREE???. Luckily I quickly sussed this out as a two word answer, FIRE EXIT. (Great clue!) I’ve never heard of BLOATWARE, clued as [Oversize computer applications, informally], but it was the only thing that made the grid work, so I didn’t question it much.

Over in the southeast, my eye went straight to the starting X for [Craftperson’s edge]. XPERTISE couldn’t be right, and there are not many terms with 10 letters that start with such a rare letter. I tried X-ACTO KNIFE, which is the term I always heard for the tool. Turned out the answer was X-ACTO BLADE, but that didn’t prove too tricky.

The southwest was the last destination, and it may well have been the trickiest. MIRANDA OTTO, the [Eowyn portrayer in two “Lord of the Rings” installments], was totally foreign to me, and that letter string of *DAOTT* really undermined my confidence. It didn’t help that I had SEAL as the [Aquarium performer] instead of ORCA and ME TOO instead of DITTO as the answer to [“Same here”].

Other items of note:

[Overseas brewing practice] had me thinking of sake and beer, so TEA CEREMONY took a while to fall.

S.E. HINTON was another foreign name to me. I didn’t know she was the [Author of “The Outsiders”], much less that she wrote it in high school. I wrote a haiku in high school. So that’s one thing we have in common.

Wonder what film had the [Movie pizzeria with a Wall of Fame featuring Italian-Americans]? It was “Do the Right Thing,” and the pizza joint was SAL’S.

Tony Orbach’s Sunday Challenge CrosSynergy crossword —Ade’s write-up

CrosSynergy Sunday Challenge crossword solution, 12.21.14

Hello everyone, and a Happy Sunday to you all! It’s the last Sunday before Christmas, so hopefully you got all your holiday shopping done!

Our super-talented, all-around nice guy, Mr. Tony Orbach, is responsible for the Sunday Challenge crossword, and it was another fun offering with great fill. I’ve heard a lot of good things about PENNY DREADFUL, and knowing that Timothy Dalton, someone whom I really appreciated in his two appearances as James Bond back in the day, is in the series makes me want give the show a whirl (23A: [Showtime horror series with Timothy Dalton]). Love the two 15-letter entries going down, BATTLE OF BRITAIN (12D: [More formal name of The Blitz]) and OUT ON THE OPEN SEA, something I would love to get to do more often as long as it’s a transatlantic flight and not a cruise (3D: [Amid a transatlantic passage, say]). Just found out recently that I get a little bit of motion sickness when I am at sea on a boat. This grid gets more points from me given the multiple entries that involve African geography, KENYA (8D: [African setting of John le Carré’s “The Constant Gardener”]) and RABAT (38A: [Capital of Morocco]). In a bit of somewhat coincidence (and mostly blogger inanity), I found it funny to see SEAT BELTS (63A: [Safety devices that became mandatory in cars starting in 1968]) in the same grid as NADIR, since it was another crossword entry favorite, nadir homophone Ralph Nader, who was so influential in making American cars much safer in the 1960s with his lobbying and reporting on shady American car makers (45A: [The absolute pits]).

“Sports will make you smarter” moment of the day: SINGLETON (18A: [Director John of “Boyz N the Hood” and “2 Fast 2 Furious”])– Former Major League baseball Ken Singleton is currently a play-by-play broadcaster and game analyst on the YES Network, the New York Yankees cable channel. As a player, mostly for the Baltimore Orioles, Singleton was one of the biggest power threats in the American League. In 1977, Singleton finished third in the AL MVP voting, and in 1979, he finished second as he hit a career-high 35 home runs and also had a career-high with 111 runs batted in. In that 1979 season, the Orioles made the World Series but lost in seven games to the “We Are Family” Pittsburgh Pirates.

See you all on Monday, and thanks for much for another week of crosswords! See you tomorrow!

Take care!

Ade/AOK

Mike Peluso’s syndicated Los Angeles Times crossword, “It’s a Start”

LA Times Sunday crossword solution, 12 21 14 “It’s a Start”

Each theme entry began as a familiar phrase or compound word. The start of each one’s final word/component becomes “a start,” with a schwa sound added and a consonant doubled to form a new word:

25a. [Speech at a revival?], TENT ADDRESS.

27a. [Variety of stars on a clear night?], COSMIC ARRAY.

56a. [Only matchmaker in town?], LONE ARRANGER. Can’t say that I call a matchmaker an “arranger,” even if they arrange blind dates.

The theme is well-constructed, with a consistency in format (A + doubled letter) and sound (schwa, not short A—ADDRESS can hold a short A, but I think when talking about oratory, the schwa pronunciation tends to hold steady).

VOICEMAIL, SQUEAKER, MINI ME, and AY CARAMBA are nice additions to the grid. More noticeable, though, were the little crosswordese bits that sneaked in:

Dove right into this one with a wrong answer at 1-across. [Red River city], five letters? Got to be HANOI. >bzzzt!<FARGO. Fortunately, things soon improved during my solve.

The theme here is based on the notion of linking up people’s names to form chains, for which it’s useful to have an arsenal of both individuals with first names that are more commonly surnames, and surnames that are commonly first names. The theme answers are derived from minimal chains of three, with the intermediary name omitted. And now I’m quite certain I’ve explained the theme in the most opaque, confusing manner possible. Onward!

Ten themers, a sizable amount. Alas, just two of the twenty individuals invoked are female, and without thinking too much about it I suspect that it has much to do with the nature of names available and not on any oversight—intentional or not—on the part of the constructor. Yep, I blame the Patriarchy-Nomenclatural complex. In any event, this is a type wordplay that I really get a kick out of, so of course I found it entertaining and enjoyable.

I held up my nose and looked askance as I filled in ALL A’S for 26a [Ideal report card?]. But it was even worse: AAAAA. Aaaaaaaah! Add to this the atrocious 94d [D-I link] EFGH and I get all gnashy. Kind of see also, 72a [Encoded A’s] ALFAS.

31d [Rhett’s last words] … A DAMN, which is Southernese for ADIEU (right, Bencoe)?

8d [Chilean chain] ANDES. They have franchise shops everywhere down there, and the only thing they sell are those little after-dinner mints.

71d [“Coup d’etat” group] JUNTA. Haven’t mentioned in a while how much the printed version italics → .puz version quotation marks transcribing policy of the CRooked crossword irks me, so consider me duly irked.